The eternal Crusades…
Religious belief has been a double-edged sword throughout the centuries. Humanity seems to be mired in perpetual Crusades where one group of believers wants to beat the crap out of another group, and vice versa. Warring crusaders are bad enough, but it’s even worse when those crusaders are using religion simply to take what others have by force and use the difference in beliefs as an excuse. SOP: Declare your enemies to be heretics in order to justify your butchering conquests. Over the years, this often translates into ethnic hatreds that transcend any of the original reasons to go to war.
Religion as the justification for butchery often transcends religion v. religion, of course. There is some indication that last Sunday’s attack on a Sikh temple was prompted by a white supremacist mistaking the Sikh religion for Islam, not that that would have justified his attack. Fanaticism often is associated with people with low IQs—if a guy has a turban, he must be Muslim, right?—or with people who are easily manipulated by others, fanatics or not, who seek personal power and gain from the manipulation.
Our white supremacist probably is in the first class. He would also attack a man for the color of his skin. A black president? Can you say U.N. conspiracy! (Yeah, I know, closet racism contributes to some of Obama’s unpopularity and the Chick-Fil-A CEO’s attack on same-sex marriage is a veiled attack on Obama’s support of it. Yes indeed, Chick-Fil-A is primarily a Southern chain—no latent racism down there.) Religious fanaticism and racism often go hand-in-hand, both here and abroad. For some (neo-Nazis, for example), racism is a religion in the sense that everyone who is not Aryan and white is fair game.
The two edges of the sword of religious belief are fundamentalism versus spiritualism, of course. Take any of the world’s great religions (I’m excluding cults here and you can determine which groups fall into that class—I have my own ideas about that) and you will generally find that the spiritual side gives solace and comfort to the faithful. The communists called religion the opium of the masses. There is truth to that—a spiritual life often relieves pain and suffering for people. I don’t understand this, but I can observe, admire it, and envy the people who lead it.
Many of these issues are treated in my novel Soldiers of God. Fundamentalism, in all shapes and forms, is the stage on which the story plays out. Spirituality is there too. The blurb subtitle of the ad copy on my “Books and Short Stories” webpage calls the novel “a sci-fi spiritual awakening,” although the differences between fundamentalism and spiritualism are highlighted. (I think the story is a damn good one too, but I’m biased.) Fundamentalism is the drug addiction; spiritualism is the opiate which may or may not lead to the fundamentalism.
The implication is that the spiritual drug can be habit forming. This is not a bad thing if the addict has sought the drug. When the habit causes proselytizing, peaceful or otherwise, I object. When people become hypocritical and use their religion to seek advantage, peaceful or otherwise, I object. I have also observed that ceremony and ritual leads to zombie-like behavior—worshippers intone the holy chants as a way of driving all thoughts from their mind. Buddhism has this as a specific goal, but attend a Catholic mass and you will see the same phenomenon.
Most human beings have a spiritual side. For me, it’s a bit more cerebral but still emotional—what moves me is art, literature, and music. I have no idea if this is at all common among people who also have a scientific or analytical side to them. There are plenty of scientists and engineers who are spiritual; there are fewer who are fundamentalists, religious or otherwise—but they’re out there. I do know that it’s difficult to imagine people going to war over a work of art, a great book (discounting the Bible and the Koran), or a chamber piece or symphony. While the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth were used to rally the Brits in WWII, nobody has fought over that symphony. I’m on safe grounds when I state that my spiritual side is not warlike.
This is why I have a hard time understanding religious fundamentalism and fanaticism. In its most egregious forms, they can lead to holocausts like the Nazis with the Jews, the Turks with the Armenians, the Serbs with the Croats, and other similar pogroms. But note the hypocrisy. The political leaders are the ones that encourage the fanaticism in order to develop scapegoats and thus distract their people from their real problems. Al Qaeda members are Islamic sinners and about as holy as Hitler. They don’t give a rat’s ass about religion—they only want power. Sure, the fanatics are to blame because they let themselves be led into fanaticism, but their leaders are even more culpable. Ahmadinejad is more evil because he has turned spiritual followers of Islam into Jew-hating fanatics—at least the Ayatollahs bow to spirituality, although they hypocritically are guilty of mixing up a heady drink of politics and religion.
Of course, it’s hard to say where religion stops and politics begin. Religion is part of culture and culture is part of politics. There is no distinction between religion and politics in a theocracy. While desires to have a theocracy in the U.S. are common across a wide spectrum of religious belief, from SBC stalwarts to conservative Catholics, the Founding Fathers were smart enough to attempt to separate the two. But it’s not freedom of religion, folks. It’s that the government shall have no official religion. You see, no matter how much you think your beliefs are the correct ones, in a theocracy there is only one religion. Iran has this problem. So does Israel! The governments of both countries (the politics) are inexorably intertwined with just one religion. Israelis will protest that they do allow other religions. “Allow” is not sufficient—the Jewish state and the Iranian state have to end their nexus to their respective religions. Neither one will survive otherwise.
We should learn from the extremism present in both Iran and Israel. It’s what awaits the U.S. if America becomes a theocracy. I’m not just talking about a belief in God, either. Everyone should be allowed to live the spiritual life that suits him. I don’t care what you believe if it keeps you content most of the time and helps you out in time of need. Even if that involves atheism, so be it. If it involves pantheism, so be it. The fact that Romney is a Mormon should not have any influence on the 2012 election although I certainly wouldn’t him to allocate government funds to try to find those golden plates. A candidate’s religious beliefs, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant, just as irrelevant as the color of his skin.
The longstanding advice to someone invited to a stranger’s house is to avoid discussing politics or religion. This advice doesn’t necessarily imply the two are intertwined, but in a discussion at the dinner table that’s what often happens. At the national political level, we must discuss politics. But let’s keep religion out of the discussion. Let’s hope that theocracies like Iran and Israel come to their senses. And let’s also hope that we can avoid our awful slide into theocracy. We don’t need any more murder and mayhem in the name of religion—not here, not anywhere.
And so it goes….
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